Sampling regions characteristic

[afontani]

Pull Request Description

Add the sampling region characteristic ahead of the geographic resolution refactor.
CEC Climate zone is modified slightly: By assigning a climate zone to a census tract. Census tracts with multiple CEC climate zones are assigned to the climate zone with the largest number of units. This has little impact, there is some small changes to the distributions ~3% in some County and PUMAs in California.

Related Pull Requests

https://github.com/NREL/resstock-estimation/pull/463

Related Issues

• Round Ground Thermal Conductivity option Option=2.0 to Option=2. Excel often replaces 2.0 with 2 and causes a diff in resstock that makes CI fail. Rounding it to be an integer avoids this from happening.

Checklist

Required:

• Add to the changelog_dev.rst file
• No unexpected regression test changes on CI (comparison artifacts have been checked)
• Update documentation (one is required)
  • Technical reference guide
  • Technical development guide

Optional (not all items may apply):

• Tests (and test files) have been updated
• Supporting resource files have been updated (related to resstock-estimation)
  • data dictionary
  • source report
  • options saturation
  • options_lookup
• openstudio tasks.rb update_measures has been run